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musician.singer.songwriter

A Song A Week

I’ve been calling myself a singer/songwriter for a while now. And as ambiguous and contentious as that label is for many of artists in the music community, it does make one thing undeniably clear- I consider myself to be a person that writes songs and sings. The only problem is that I have a hard time calling myself a songwriter when my output of songs over my (albeit short) career has been dismally small. Sure, I have pages filled with lyrics and chord progressions and I am constantly writing. But to actually finish a song with music, melodies, structure, etc. (or even a sketch of a song) is much more difficult for me, for whatever reason. In the past four years, I’ve compiled an embarrassingly meager repertoire of original music for someone who calls himself a songwriter.

That’s why when my good friend and fellow singer/songwriter Rob Deez posed a song a week songwriting challenge, I whole-heartedly accepted. The terms were simple- write one song a week and post it on your SoundCloud account. We come up with a word and topic for each week and give ourselves a week and a day to produce something. If you fail to produce something, you owe the other person a six-pack of beer. And so we began our songwriting exercise with our good friend Broni joining in at the start and a few other friends like Isaac Cheong and Jon Huse a few weeks later.

Again, this is just a musical exercise. I’m using it as a motivator to complete a song and as a way to focus my inspiration and creativity at will, instead of being totally at the mercy of its spontaneous nature.

If you’re interested in checking out any of the songs I’ve written as a result of this challenge, check out my SoundCloud page.

Unfortunately, I’m not going to post every song I write. I generally know when I have something good enough to share or not. Hopefully, one of the results of this exercise is that I’ll get better at writing songs that I consider “good enough” more quickly and thus, will be able to share more of them! It may take a while, but everything worth recognizing does!